Social Media Engineers

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It’s been a long time since I’ve posted. I decided I would come back with gifts. I am offering 4 free video landing page templates if you subscribe to the mailing list.

You get the fully coded HTML and the PSD files so you can edit these however you see fit. Each template has social links added so your landing page can be shared. I’ve included a help file to help you edit the landing page templates to use your own videos.

I’ve had a few conversations lately about how to DO social media. One of them was with an “expert” in the field who told me that it’s all about numbers. I have to get my like count as high as I can. I have to get as many followers as I can. I was shown examples of campaigns that had high amounts of both.

To be frank, I’m surprised that this is still a strategy that people employ. When I looked over the examples of “successful” social media campaigns, I couldn’t help but notice something that I see pretty often. There was no interaction on the Facebook page and were very very few tweets on the Twitter timeline that I was looking at. At least, not from the fans and followers.

Like a lot of these social media campaigners, I noticed that this “expert” was doing it all very very wrong.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. I’ve been busy trying to launch a few projects but this morning I read through some links posted on Twitter and one of them reminded me of a conversation that I had recently.

The conversation was about how to gain more followers. Not only on Twitter but on LinkedIn and Facebook Pages as well.

I’m not a big proponent of collecting followers on any social platform. I actually think that it can dilute your social marketing efforts quite a bit. In fact, the anecdote that I often share to illustrate this is an old Twitter account that I had a few years ago.

Lately I’ve been working on a project that has me working with landing pages quite a bit. Taking a look around at what some other people are doing, I’ve been noticing a very apparent lack of a landing page content strategy.

You’ve probably seen the type of landing pages that I’m talking about. They tend to have a big bold red headline, typically using an image so that the font has a few design styles applied to it.

Or, maybe they skip the headline all together and simply drop a video on the page (without controls to pause, seek or stop) and leave it at that.

I know these types of landing pages aren’t typically crafted for SERP’s but I can’t understand why you would create a landing page that doesn’t at least try to get the extra visits that an organic search would bring in.

I really like to watch the show Shark Tank. I like to see what kind of crazy ideas people out there have but mostly, I like to see the people who deserve the help they need to launch their dreams get that help.

Tonight that didn’t happen but something else did.

Tonight there was a guy on the show who creates natural, preservative free jerky. He had a good story and you could see a passion behind it. He didn’t get the deal from the sharks but based on his personality and his story, I wanted to take a look to see what kind of online presence he had.

Before you read, I want to let you know that I’m not affiliated with Conversion Rate Experts or SEOMoz in any way. I’m sharing this because it really is a valuable piece of content.

This has been posted around the web quite a bit but I want to go ahead and post it as well. I stumbled onto the Conversion Rate Experts SEOMoz case study and just have to say it is probably the best landing page lesson out there.

If you sign up for their free newsletter they’ll send you an annotated pdf of the landing page. If you’re at all interested in landing page creation and conversion, this is really a nice find.

Some of the points in the annotations are things that you’ve probably heard before but there are some nice tips that just need to be re-iterated. The also break down how they went about getting testers, the tools they used in the page creation and some of the psychology behind the design choices.

I would recommend you at least check out the post here and sign up for the newsletter to get the annotated PDF.

Ok, that’s a bit dramatic but it really is pretty easy to mess up your chances for a lot of great opportunities. Even if your social profiles are for personal use, let’s take a look at a scenario.

You get laid off. You need to find a job. You set up an interview with a company for next week.

The person doing the interview decides to do a little digging to see what he/she can find on you, which is much more common than you think. So this person opens up their favorite browser, types your name into the search box and …. wow.